Violence against women is not a new phenomenon. But its unprecedented expansion in patriarchal capitalist imperialist world has become a horrible phenomenon because women’s bodies have become more and more an object to serve the economic policies of states to gain super profit. The global chain of violence, has Put millions of women together and their struggle and resistance are becoming more global.

One of the main indexes of violence is the control of woman’s body. With the right-wing extremist and fascist forces gaining more power in capitalist imperialist countries, the conditions for limiting women’s rights have become readily available. Within those, the right to abortion, which is about controlling woman’s body, has been attacked by the right-wing fascist states and religious fundamentalists more than before. The apparent attack and new conditions and Constraint for abortion is decisive in order to maintain the subordinate position of women and to strengthen patriarchal relations, because reproduction in the capitalist class society is one of the main pillars of women’s oppression.

In the Middle East, we face anti-women states and fundamentalist forces that based on Sharia law, and by imposing hijab, are in full control of women’s bodies. They have enslaved women by introducing and passing various types of anti-women laws.

In Iran, the theocratic Islamic regime organized its first attack on women, as soon as it took power, by forcing hijab on them. This reactionary government, needed to force hijab and state control over women’s bodies in order to ideologically consolidate the Islamic fundamentalist rule. Because women’s role is to be merely a means of reproduction for the continuation of this system of oppression and exploitation. In anti-woman Islamic Republic system, forced hijab and organized repressive forces to control women, serve the benefit of male domination over women and intensify women’s inferior position. Forced hijab, as one of the most symbolic forms of state violence to control women’s bodies, has a decisive ideological role for this regime.

These realities reveal that in the whole world, women and their bodies are under an organized and systematic violence by patriarchal capitalist system. A system that cannot survive without consolidating and legalizing the superiority of men over women in various economic, social and cultural spheres. Consequently, for them, it is imperative to organize a comprehensive and ruthless war against women.

But in this daily war, sometimes targeting woman individually and sometimes collectively, we are not and never will be obedient victims. As conscious and revolutionary women, we have enough experiences, motivation and anger, courage, and an emancipatory horizon, to put an end to this war and hate against women along with our sisters throughout the world that share the same fate. We have scientific and emancipatory theories and by relying on them, wherever we are, we can help to raise women’s awareness to be more organized. We know that without the full emancipation of women, we can neither end violence against women and control of their bodies caused by the unequal power relations between men and women, nor the subordination of “woman’s nature”, nor the violence of “man’s nature”.

This oppressive relation is born from and breeds patriarchal class system, which has been intensified in the present era of capitalism. We must bring it down and end the ownership of woman by men. We must at the same time, end all forms of oppression and exploitation with a broad and revolutionary horizon, in order to create a world in which women, without any fear or obstacle, can be an active part of the dynamic cycle of society, to serve the emancipation of humanity.

Campaign to Fight State, Social and Domestic Violence against Women in Iran 25 November 2017